This will be a long one, sorry for the novel and if it is disorganized. I'm not used to being this emotional.
I've posted here before, wasn't very welcome due to my personality and outlook on life and relationships and was often accused of trolling. I'm not trolling or stirring the pot or whatever else you may try to accuse me of. This is real, a real situation, and I don't know where else to turn.
I've been married for almost 13 years and have two young sons. I married at 21. I finished high school, never went to college or had higher schooling due to both poor health and finances. I worked for the first year of our marriage and other than a small home business I created, I have been a housewife and mother for the duration of the marriage. I am epileptic, and my condition only finally improved enough for me to obtain a driver's licence last year. It was my first step towards any type of independance, especially when my husband bought me a car. I also do some writing online and have made a small niche for myself in a sport community, which I love.
I come from a very conservative, religious, family, yet also from a broken home. My father was involved in several affairs and my mother left him. He had very little to do with my brother and I as I grew up and my stepfather was an idiot. My home life was unsettled and stressful. My mother is a bipolar alcoholic and we have a very tempestuous relationship. It is very true that those who preach the loudest, sin the hardest.
My father's adultery never bothered me much. I could never understand why my mother was so torn up about it. My father was a horrible man and his influence destroyed my mother. I can understand her wanting to get away from him for that, but the affairs never bothered me. I even met several of his girlfriends. I didn't like them because mum didn't like them, but I was very young. Throughout my life my issues with my father stemmed from him being a giant jerk and not from the fact that he had affairs.
My husband was very well aware of my history before we married. We broke up during our engagement when I moved in with a much older man after a particularly bad spell with my dad. I never slept with the man, I am very good at getting what I want from men without giving anything in return. He was a stupid man and couldn't believe his luck in attracting a young beautiful woman (his words). My then fiance and I were broken up for several months. I don't remember the actual length, a lot of that time is very blurry and I don't remember details. He says I called him on New Year's Eve of 2001. I have no recollection of this. We soon resumed our relationship and I moved back in with my mother. My illness took a severe turn, i was hospitalized, and then returned home. My fiance stayed by me the whole time. As a side note, since I was raised so conservatively I didn't believe in sex before marriage and remained a virgin till my wedding night. Well, a technical virgin...barely. I was i n control of all sexual activity that occurred and things stopped when I wanted them to.
We married in 2002 and had the traditional white wedding and traditional wedding night. It was a horrible experience for me. It was painful and invasive and traumatic and barely successful. I HATED it and HATED that he wanted sex all the time. How dare he want to hurt me and use me in that way? I developed yeast infections for the first time in my life, along with cystitis and my resentment grew. Still, he wanted sex. All the time. Typical newlywed I guess. Even now as I write this I feel stirrings of the old anger and resentment that I was hurt and humiliated and he didn't care, he just wanted to get his rocks off. Our sex life for the first 4 years was horrible. Painful and awful for me, never enough or good enough for him. Resentment and animosity grew.
Then I decided I wanted a baby. I talked him into it and he was soon on board. I became pregnant quickly, and it was the most sex he ever had up to that point. I had an extremely difficult birth that resulted in severe tearing and I needed a lot of stitches. When I finally healed, it turned out that sex was no longer painful for me. I still didn't like it, nor see what the fuss was about. I figured he just wanted to get off and I was the only woman he was allowed to use so I was just convenient for him. Honestly, I still feel that way. I have no emotional connection to sex whatsoever and it irritates me that he does.
I suffered post partum depression after both children, but it was particularly bad with my second son. I came very close to doing him serious harm and those were some of the blackest days of my life. I still don't think my husband understands how bad it was. I was put back on anti depressants that I had been on as a teenager. That helped a great deal. I never had much of a sex drive to lose so the side effects were negligible.
By the time my second child was 4, I was a full time stay at home mum and had discovered that I really wasn't suited to the position. I can't stand being needed and children are disgustingly needy. I am grateful that both of mine developed my independent streak and aren't as bad as some. I was able to have some quiet time. My downtime was spent online, mostly on Facebook or in an online forum for outdoors enthusiasts. It was on this forum that I was approached by a man. I did not know him in real life. But he liked me. It's not unusual...my physical appearance attracts people, my personality repels them. He started sending me messages on Facebook and at first I wasn't all that interested. He was a stranger and I didn't much care for getting messages from strange men. Not because I'm married, but because I don't like being approached by people I don't know. But he was persistent and very flirtatious. The attention caught my attention....this person seemed to like me. He was v ery complimentary, and we began talking throughout the day. I spent a good part of my day messaging him and we talked back and forth about our mutual interest in the outdoors, and then that progressed to light flirting and then to some more aggressive sex talk on his part. I loved the attention and the power....but I being sexually closed off didn't really know what to say so I played along but let him do most of the talking. Never once did it occur to me that there was anything wrong in what I was doing. I didn't hide it. I had no passwords or locks. I even told my husband I'd been chatting with a guy on Facebook. He didn't really care. He was concerned though, with the amount of time I spent online and my obvious dissatisfaction with my life. So one night he got on my laptop and read my chats and all hell broke loose. I was utterly shocked by his reaction. He was furious at the sexual tone of the chats and that this man was so sexually interested in me. I still have a hard time understanding his reaction. Of course the man was interested in me sexually....I'm female. And the only way to keep him interested in me was to let him think I was sexually interested in him. It's not that hard to convince a man of that....they all want to believe it. I could get the man to say anything....it was like winning the jackpot when I could make him say what I wanted. But then I would despise him a little more each time he did because he was so easily manipulated. And the bull**** stories he would tell to impress...sooo stupid and full of crap, yet the idea that he wanted to impress me was intoxicating.
Anyway, my husband demanded that I stop talking to the man and I refused. He was my amusement and what difference did it make to my husband what I did online? The man lived 6 hours away. I had no intention or desire to actually be with the man, who was living common law and had a couple of kids. I was angry at my H who was making this all about him, and his feelings and his wants. If he'd never read my chats, not one thing would have changed for him. It didn't affect him at all. We fought about if for weeks. He kicked me out one night, I went to hotel....so much drama over such a stupid thing. I finally agreed to give up the man just for some peace and because my H was in such a state. He was so emotional and crying and so upset...all over some conversations. It makes no sense at all to me, still to this day. Anyway, I deleted the man. Then a few weeks later the man and I were involved in organizing a competition together so I added him back to FB. The chats started up soon after, innocent at first and then he became graphic again. Unbeknownst to me, my H was logged in to my FB from work and was reading the whole thing as it happened and phoned me threatening divorce. That night was the battle royale and I deleted the man for good. I ran into him once at a tournament and he really is a pathetic little man.
Fast forward a few years and in the interim I have had a sexual awakening. I've discovered my sexual power and have also discovered that I'm bi-curious. Our sex life is great, for the most part. We've now come to the place where I'm more adventurous than he is, but we are working on that. He is very much a one man, one woman, traditional, lots of love and emotion and ooey gooey touchy feely stuff and that doesn't work for me. Sex for me is either recreation or a transaction. I have no feelings about it and his insistance on it being a bonding activity irritates me relentlessly. I have given him a free pass to have sex with whoever he wants and that seemed to hurt him?? I don't know why?? He has to be the most complicated man alive. I give him freedom and he acts like its an insult.
A year and a half ago I met a man in real life and I was fascinated by him. He was physically appealing to me, built much like my husband in fact. He is a scientist and a minor celebrity in the sporting industry. We clicked immediately. We became friends on FB, but didn't start messaging or having frequent contact for another eight months or so. Last winter we were set to attend an industry show and he needed a ride so I gave him one. We began texting around that time and have been texting on a daily basis since then. Most of our texts were about business, science, or sport. But they became friendlier and flirtier. This time I had a password on my phone because I had explicit photos on there and my kids would get ahold of my phone. H didn't know about the texts, although he knew I was good friends with the scientist. The scientist is a heavy drinker and up to that point, I very rarely indulged. I had suffered a back injury and had taken to soaking in the bath and decided I wo uld try some whiskey to help with the pain. I ended up drinking nearly half a bottle as the scientist egged me on via text. Some explicit texts were sent back and forth, this time I was the aggressor. It was only the second time in my life that I'd been drunk. And I got very very drunk. I don't remember the texts, but after I fell asleep my H read through my phone. He'd gotten suspicious and cracked my passcode. He woke me up and hell broke loose again. I remember very little of it.
Anyway, I apologized when I sobered up. I really didn't mean to do that, the explicit texts. I don't like being the one giving out stuff like that. And I valued the scientist for his other uses, and didn't want to screw up that relationship. I promised H that things wouldn't get like that again. He didn't like that I remained in contact with the scientist but was understanding, both of my need of him in his professional use, and in my using him for my own gratification. As long as things were kept PG we were good. And things were. I kept everything on the up and up. No pics, no sex talk, nothing raunchy. But it became increasingly obvious that H wasn't really ok with it and we had several vicious fights. One evening after an event I went out to dinner with the scientist and H nearly lost his mind. I didn't see what the problem was...we were in a public place and discussing business. H had fifty fits. After that H became more and more anti-scientist and things became increasin gly tense between us. He wanted me to cut ties with the scientist and I wanted him to back off and let me have my own circle of friends and interests. As long as I'm not sleeping with anyone else, I'm not cheating on him so I really can't understand what he gets so worked up about. He really needs to get a hold on his emotions. I told him I wouldn't sleep with anyone else because he is not cool with that, and honestly neither am I. I don't care if he does, but I just don't want to get that involved in drama with another human. I can barely stand the drama I have right now.
So we were on vacation last week at a cottage when H looks at my phone while I'm sleeping. This really irritates me, but he does it and I gave him my password because I have nothing to hide. Stupid idiot scientist sends me a porn pic and dear god H nearly has apoplexy. I knew nothing about the pic or why it was sent...it had never happened before and while the pic didn't offend me and I still don't see why H was so angry...it was a pic of a woman, not a man, ..it was really out of context of the whole relationship and had I found it first, I doubtless would have been perplexed myself as to why it was sent.
H gave me an ultimatum....him or the scientist. Obviously I picked him...I have no desire to be with the scientist. I just really enjoy the validation I receive from such a man. It allows me to feel like more that just a pathetic housewife when real people notice me, and letting go of that is extraordinarily difficult. H can't get his head around that, any more than I can understand why it makes any difference to him what people say to me. I can't see how if affects him one way or another and we continue to be at loggerheads on this issue.
I want to have my own space with my own friends and be responsible for maintaining my own happiness. I am already too dependent on him for everything else and it disgusts me. I want him to have enough confidence in himself to realize that I love him and only him. I've never loved another human being by choice. Only him. Family and my children I love by biological directive. He is the only one I chose to love. The only one I've ever fought for. Why can't that be enough?
I've posted here before, wasn't very welcome due to my personality and outlook on life and relationships and was often accused of trolling. I'm not trolling or stirring the pot or whatever else you may try to accuse me of. This is real, a real situation, and I don't know where else to turn.
I've been married for almost 13 years and have two young sons. I married at 21. I finished high school, never went to college or had higher schooling due to both poor health and finances. I worked for the first year of our marriage and other than a small home business I created, I have been a housewife and mother for the duration of the marriage. I am epileptic, and my condition only finally improved enough for me to obtain a driver's licence last year. It was my first step towards any type of independance, especially when my husband bought me a car. I also do some writing online and have made a small niche for myself in a sport community, which I love.
I come from a very conservative, religious, family, yet also from a broken home. My father was involved in several affairs and my mother left him. He had very little to do with my brother and I as I grew up and my stepfather was an idiot. My home life was unsettled and stressful. My mother is a bipolar alcoholic and we have a very tempestuous relationship. It is very true that those who preach the loudest, sin the hardest.
My father's adultery never bothered me much. I could never understand why my mother was so torn up about it. My father was a horrible man and his influence destroyed my mother. I can understand her wanting to get away from him for that, but the affairs never bothered me. I even met several of his girlfriends. I didn't like them because mum didn't like them, but I was very young. Throughout my life my issues with my father stemmed from him being a giant jerk and not from the fact that he had affairs.
My husband was very well aware of my history before we married. We broke up during our engagement when I moved in with a much older man after a particularly bad spell with my dad. I never slept with the man, I am very good at getting what I want from men without giving anything in return. He was a stupid man and couldn't believe his luck in attracting a young beautiful woman (his words). My then fiance and I were broken up for several months. I don't remember the actual length, a lot of that time is very blurry and I don't remember details. He says I called him on New Year's Eve of 2001. I have no recollection of this. We soon resumed our relationship and I moved back in with my mother. My illness took a severe turn, i was hospitalized, and then returned home. My fiance stayed by me the whole time. As a side note, since I was raised so conservatively I didn't believe in sex before marriage and remained a virgin till my wedding night. Well, a technical virgin...barely. I was i n control of all sexual activity that occurred and things stopped when I wanted them to.
We married in 2002 and had the traditional white wedding and traditional wedding night. It was a horrible experience for me. It was painful and invasive and traumatic and barely successful. I HATED it and HATED that he wanted sex all the time. How dare he want to hurt me and use me in that way? I developed yeast infections for the first time in my life, along with cystitis and my resentment grew. Still, he wanted sex. All the time. Typical newlywed I guess. Even now as I write this I feel stirrings of the old anger and resentment that I was hurt and humiliated and he didn't care, he just wanted to get his rocks off. Our sex life for the first 4 years was horrible. Painful and awful for me, never enough or good enough for him. Resentment and animosity grew.
Then I decided I wanted a baby. I talked him into it and he was soon on board. I became pregnant quickly, and it was the most sex he ever had up to that point. I had an extremely difficult birth that resulted in severe tearing and I needed a lot of stitches. When I finally healed, it turned out that sex was no longer painful for me. I still didn't like it, nor see what the fuss was about. I figured he just wanted to get off and I was the only woman he was allowed to use so I was just convenient for him. Honestly, I still feel that way. I have no emotional connection to sex whatsoever and it irritates me that he does.
I suffered post partum depression after both children, but it was particularly bad with my second son. I came very close to doing him serious harm and those were some of the blackest days of my life. I still don't think my husband understands how bad it was. I was put back on anti depressants that I had been on as a teenager. That helped a great deal. I never had much of a sex drive to lose so the side effects were negligible.
By the time my second child was 4, I was a full time stay at home mum and had discovered that I really wasn't suited to the position. I can't stand being needed and children are disgustingly needy. I am grateful that both of mine developed my independent streak and aren't as bad as some. I was able to have some quiet time. My downtime was spent online, mostly on Facebook or in an online forum for outdoors enthusiasts. It was on this forum that I was approached by a man. I did not know him in real life. But he liked me. It's not unusual...my physical appearance attracts people, my personality repels them. He started sending me messages on Facebook and at first I wasn't all that interested. He was a stranger and I didn't much care for getting messages from strange men. Not because I'm married, but because I don't like being approached by people I don't know. But he was persistent and very flirtatious. The attention caught my attention....this person seemed to like me. He was v ery complimentary, and we began talking throughout the day. I spent a good part of my day messaging him and we talked back and forth about our mutual interest in the outdoors, and then that progressed to light flirting and then to some more aggressive sex talk on his part. I loved the attention and the power....but I being sexually closed off didn't really know what to say so I played along but let him do most of the talking. Never once did it occur to me that there was anything wrong in what I was doing. I didn't hide it. I had no passwords or locks. I even told my husband I'd been chatting with a guy on Facebook. He didn't really care. He was concerned though, with the amount of time I spent online and my obvious dissatisfaction with my life. So one night he got on my laptop and read my chats and all hell broke loose. I was utterly shocked by his reaction. He was furious at the sexual tone of the chats and that this man was so sexually interested in me. I still have a hard time understanding his reaction. Of course the man was interested in me sexually....I'm female. And the only way to keep him interested in me was to let him think I was sexually interested in him. It's not that hard to convince a man of that....they all want to believe it. I could get the man to say anything....it was like winning the jackpot when I could make him say what I wanted. But then I would despise him a little more each time he did because he was so easily manipulated. And the bull**** stories he would tell to impress...sooo stupid and full of crap, yet the idea that he wanted to impress me was intoxicating.
Anyway, my husband demanded that I stop talking to the man and I refused. He was my amusement and what difference did it make to my husband what I did online? The man lived 6 hours away. I had no intention or desire to actually be with the man, who was living common law and had a couple of kids. I was angry at my H who was making this all about him, and his feelings and his wants. If he'd never read my chats, not one thing would have changed for him. It didn't affect him at all. We fought about if for weeks. He kicked me out one night, I went to hotel....so much drama over such a stupid thing. I finally agreed to give up the man just for some peace and because my H was in such a state. He was so emotional and crying and so upset...all over some conversations. It makes no sense at all to me, still to this day. Anyway, I deleted the man. Then a few weeks later the man and I were involved in organizing a competition together so I added him back to FB. The chats started up soon after, innocent at first and then he became graphic again. Unbeknownst to me, my H was logged in to my FB from work and was reading the whole thing as it happened and phoned me threatening divorce. That night was the battle royale and I deleted the man for good. I ran into him once at a tournament and he really is a pathetic little man.
Fast forward a few years and in the interim I have had a sexual awakening. I've discovered my sexual power and have also discovered that I'm bi-curious. Our sex life is great, for the most part. We've now come to the place where I'm more adventurous than he is, but we are working on that. He is very much a one man, one woman, traditional, lots of love and emotion and ooey gooey touchy feely stuff and that doesn't work for me. Sex for me is either recreation or a transaction. I have no feelings about it and his insistance on it being a bonding activity irritates me relentlessly. I have given him a free pass to have sex with whoever he wants and that seemed to hurt him?? I don't know why?? He has to be the most complicated man alive. I give him freedom and he acts like its an insult.
A year and a half ago I met a man in real life and I was fascinated by him. He was physically appealing to me, built much like my husband in fact. He is a scientist and a minor celebrity in the sporting industry. We clicked immediately. We became friends on FB, but didn't start messaging or having frequent contact for another eight months or so. Last winter we were set to attend an industry show and he needed a ride so I gave him one. We began texting around that time and have been texting on a daily basis since then. Most of our texts were about business, science, or sport. But they became friendlier and flirtier. This time I had a password on my phone because I had explicit photos on there and my kids would get ahold of my phone. H didn't know about the texts, although he knew I was good friends with the scientist. The scientist is a heavy drinker and up to that point, I very rarely indulged. I had suffered a back injury and had taken to soaking in the bath and decided I wo uld try some whiskey to help with the pain. I ended up drinking nearly half a bottle as the scientist egged me on via text. Some explicit texts were sent back and forth, this time I was the aggressor. It was only the second time in my life that I'd been drunk. And I got very very drunk. I don't remember the texts, but after I fell asleep my H read through my phone. He'd gotten suspicious and cracked my passcode. He woke me up and hell broke loose again. I remember very little of it.
Anyway, I apologized when I sobered up. I really didn't mean to do that, the explicit texts. I don't like being the one giving out stuff like that. And I valued the scientist for his other uses, and didn't want to screw up that relationship. I promised H that things wouldn't get like that again. He didn't like that I remained in contact with the scientist but was understanding, both of my need of him in his professional use, and in my using him for my own gratification. As long as things were kept PG we were good. And things were. I kept everything on the up and up. No pics, no sex talk, nothing raunchy. But it became increasingly obvious that H wasn't really ok with it and we had several vicious fights. One evening after an event I went out to dinner with the scientist and H nearly lost his mind. I didn't see what the problem was...we were in a public place and discussing business. H had fifty fits. After that H became more and more anti-scientist and things became increasin gly tense between us. He wanted me to cut ties with the scientist and I wanted him to back off and let me have my own circle of friends and interests. As long as I'm not sleeping with anyone else, I'm not cheating on him so I really can't understand what he gets so worked up about. He really needs to get a hold on his emotions. I told him I wouldn't sleep with anyone else because he is not cool with that, and honestly neither am I. I don't care if he does, but I just don't want to get that involved in drama with another human. I can barely stand the drama I have right now.
So we were on vacation last week at a cottage when H looks at my phone while I'm sleeping. This really irritates me, but he does it and I gave him my password because I have nothing to hide. Stupid idiot scientist sends me a porn pic and dear god H nearly has apoplexy. I knew nothing about the pic or why it was sent...it had never happened before and while the pic didn't offend me and I still don't see why H was so angry...it was a pic of a woman, not a man, ..it was really out of context of the whole relationship and had I found it first, I doubtless would have been perplexed myself as to why it was sent.
H gave me an ultimatum....him or the scientist. Obviously I picked him...I have no desire to be with the scientist. I just really enjoy the validation I receive from such a man. It allows me to feel like more that just a pathetic housewife when real people notice me, and letting go of that is extraordinarily difficult. H can't get his head around that, any more than I can understand why it makes any difference to him what people say to me. I can't see how if affects him one way or another and we continue to be at loggerheads on this issue.
I want to have my own space with my own friends and be responsible for maintaining my own happiness. I am already too dependent on him for everything else and it disgusts me. I want him to have enough confidence in himself to realize that I love him and only him. I've never loved another human being by choice. Only him. Family and my children I love by biological directive. He is the only one I chose to love. The only one I've ever fought for. Why can't that be enough?
Put the internet to work for you.
No comments:
Post a Comment